I remember chatting with a parent last year who had handed her 13-year-old a smartphone with the best parental controls money could buy. Within days the boy had found his way to sites no child should see. That quiet frustration sits behind the numbers Ofcom released this week. Their Use of Age Assurance Report 2026, published on 15 July, paints a picture of unprecedented deployment of age checks one year into the Online Safety Act's key duties. Yet it also underscores how regulatory ambition collides with technological reality and human ingenuity.
Over 69 million age checks were completed across a sample of 32 UK services between July and December 2025. That figure represents a 23-fold increase on the previous six months. The proportion of children encountering highly effective checks rose from 25 percent to 43 percent. In the pornography sector, 64 of the top 100 services had implemented age assurance by June 2026, up from 41 the previous August. All of the UK's top 10 porn services now have checks in place, and another 10 of the leading 100 simply geo-block British users.
These numbers sound impressive at first glance. Eight percent of children aged 8 to 14 visited pornography services during the period studied. Half of those visits were to sites with age checks. Most visits, 87 percent, lasted under 30 seconds, with 65 percent under 10 seconds. The data suggests many youngsters click, see the barrier and move on. But dig deeper and the cracks appear. Thirty-three percent of first-page Google results and 54 percent of Bing results still led straight to unprotected porn sites. Sixty-two percent of the children who reached such material had used a search engine immediately beforehand.
Enforcement reveals the gaps
Ofcom has not been idle. It has opened 23 investigations into providers of 88 adult services. Seventy-three percent of those have now put in age assurance or blocked UK users. Fines have been issued to seven providers covering 24 sites. A formal investigation is under way into whether TikTok is meeting its duties to protect children from harmful content. The regulator plans to deliver a rapid assessment to Parliament by the end of October on what highly effective age checks should look like for determining whether someone is over 16, and will publish a statutory report on app store protections by January 2027.
Dame Melanie Dawes, chief executive of Ofcom, captured the mixed picture neatly.
Age checks are a cornerstone of the UK’s online safety laws. When implemented properly, our evidence shows that age checks are helping to create a safer life online for children in the UK. But the job is not done and tech companies need to go further. Too many services have no or inadequate age checks in place, which is not good enough. We’ve today launched an investigation into whether TikTok’s age checks are effective in preventing children from seeing harmful content on its platform. And search engines must urgently work with us to solve the problem of children finding porn sites without age checks too easily via their results pages. As the UK prepares for further new social media restrictions at 16, the age check landscape is already shifting towards a stronger, whole-of-system approach, which is important to avoid any single point of failure. We want to see continued innovation from the wider tech industry to strengthen protections for children - including from operating systems and at an app store and device-level.
Her words reveal the central tension. The UK stands at the forefront of global efforts on age assurance. Twelve percent of 15- to 17-year-olds visited one of the three highest-reaching dating apps in December 2025. Gaming and social media face similar pressures. Yet no single method eliminates circumvention. Age inference, the report notes, is not considered highly effective for blocking access to pornographic content. Some services have failed to follow guidance on liveness detection and challenge-age approaches. Children, especially teenagers, have always found ways around barriers. VPNs, shared accounts, false dates of birth, older siblings, the list goes on.
